Poetry Quotes

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

I wrote The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God in five hours, but I had it all planned out. It isn't poetry and it does not pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

No art form points like poetry to this originality of language as to its essential and abiding concern.

When I was younger, I felt it was my duty to wake people up. I thought poetry was asleep. I thought rock 'n' roll was asleep.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours.

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

PC stuff just lowers the general acceptance of good work and replaces it with bogus poetry that celebrates values that in themselves are probably quite worthy.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.